British Film | Cagey Films

Recent releases from the BFI Flipside

Posted on September 7, 2022September 7, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Ian (Edward Woodward) goes off the road, just as he did in his dream in Lindsey C. Vickers' The Appointment (1981)

Two recent BFI Flipside releases unearth an odd assortment of movies from the fringes – the standalone feature The Appointment (Lindsey C. Vickers, 1981) and volume 2 of the Short Sharp Shocks anthology series which includes the allegorical horror of Ian F.H. Lloyd’s The Face of Darkness (1976), a mix of crime and ghosts in John Gillings Escape from Broadmoor (1948), horror as feminist thesis in The Mark of Lilith (1986), the proto-music video Jack the Ripper with Screaming Lord Sutch (1963), a couple of unsettling PSAs and other ephemera.

Folk horror and Argentine noir

Posted on January 26, 2022April 25, 2023 by Kenneth George Godwin

Collage is used as an organizing principle in Kier-la Janisse's epic folk horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021)

The year gets off to an interesting start with a pair of excellent Argentinian films noirs – Román Viñoly Barreto’s The Beast Must Die (1952) and Fernando Ayala’s The Bitter Stems (1956) – beautifully restored by the Film Noir Foundation; Prana Bailey-Bond’s Censor (2021), a disturbing British psychological horror; and Kier-la Janisse’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021), an epic documentary exploring the folk horror genre.

Year End 2021

Posted on January 1, 2022January 5, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

The Count (Udo Kier) is worried about his blood supply in Paul Morrissey's Blood for Dracula (1974)

It’s been a good year for movies on disk, with a remarkable range of releases from many companies which are devoting considerable resources to rediscovering, restoring and preserving movies in numerous genres. Ranging across nationalities and spanning cinema history, there was plenty to divert attention from a real world which has become so depressing and exhausting.

Spooky

Posted on March 3, 2021December 27, 2021 by Kenneth George Godwin

A creepy antique doll provides a link to an unhappy past in Stephen Weeks' Ghost Story (1974)

I can now say from personal experience that watching horror movies a week after having a heart attack (even a relatively minor one) may not be the smartest idea – but I did enjoy these five eerie features.

2020: Year-End Thoughts

Posted on December 30, 2020December 29, 2020 by Kenneth George Godwin

The cost of security and comfort is high in George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978)

It’s that time of year again. How to decide what’s “best” out of the six-hundred-plus movies I watched in 2020? It’s an impossible task, so here’s a fairly random selection of things which may not be best, but certainly appealed to me and stuck in my memory.

Fall viewing, part one

Posted on November 11, 2020March 19, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Beware the mutant spider bite in Fritz Böttger's Horrors of Spider Island (1960)

A round-up of recent viewing, as usual heavy on horror and exploitation.

In dreams

Posted on August 12, 2020November 23, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Anna (Charlotte Burke) finds herself in a landscape she drew in Bernard Rose's Paperhouse (1988)

Three movies from the 1980s rooted in the intersection of dreams and reality are rescued from obscurity with excellent Blu-ray editions — two in recent Arrow releases, Harley Cokeliss’ Dream Demon (1988) and Mike Hodges Black Rainbow (1989), and one, Bernard Rose’s Paperhouse (1988), on a now out-of-print French disk.

Bleak Britain

Posted on June 10, 2020December 10, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Mrs Ross (Edith Evans) lives in a world beset by forces beyond her control in Bryan Forbes' The Whisperers (1967)

The British have a tendency to indulge in miserablism, a characteristic that filmmakers have been turning into powerful dramatic art for decades. Bryan Forbes’ The Whisperers (1967) and Ray Davies’ Return to Waterloo (1984) approach it from very different directions, but both create powerful portraits of people living depressing lives.

Pandemic viewing, Part Four

Posted on May 9, 2020May 30, 2021 by Kenneth George Godwin

Tiny Tim as Mervo tries to entertain Jill (Itonia Salchek) in Bill Rebane's Bloody Harvest (1986)

Social isolation and “working from home” mean a lot of time for movie-watching … and the volume far outstrips my ability to say anything substantive about many of the films I do watch: so here I mostly just acknowledge what I’ve been viewing in the past 4-6 weeks. Part four of four.

A Kino Lorber miscellany

Posted on January 29, 2020December 10, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Everything begins to look suspicious to Jane (Pamela Franklin) in Robert Fuest's And Soon the Darkness (1970)

In the past few years Kino Lorber has become one of the most prolific disk producers with a remarkably varied catalogue representing every imaginable genre. Here, I look at a half dozen KL releases by a range of interesting directors – Robert Fuest, Ken Russell, Alain Robak, Harold Becker, Don Siegel and Sam Peckinpah.

Tag: British Film